META Description Not Showing Up On Google
-
Hi, I have noticed recently that for my highest ranking keyword on Google United Kingdom, the meta description (that has not changed for several months and always used to be displayed when someone searched for this keyword) now only shows the first couple of words. Also, instead of the rest of the Meta Description there is a list of items that I offer for sale all squashed together with their individual prices. I am the only company on page one of Google who's impression looks like this and I think it looks really unprofessional. Why has this happened and how do I change it?
Any help is much appreciated
-
If you visit your Google Webmaster account, you can instruct Google not to display your links like that on your search result page.
The content="noodp,noydir" syntax is to prevent other Directories from displaying (or cache) different meta descriptions about your site.
-
I noticed one competing page from Pandora's Choice.com was displaying the same format snippet. You're not the only one.
-
Yes, thanks Doug, makes sense now I have read up on Snippets.
-
Yes, thanks, I have just read through those two posts and it makes sense to me now as to why it is happening. I have to say I don't like it, it looks messy and amateur in my opinion, especially as I have spent so long learning about meta descriptions and how to apply them successfully etc My only question is that Google's post was dated August last year where they state that they were 'rolling it out globally'. So should I expect my competitors' sites to appear the same in the near future? (their sites are similar to mine) As at the moment, my website is the only one displaying these 'lists' for my most popular keywords.
Many thanks for your help
-
Looks like Google is creating an ecommerce related snipped. Your site isn't the only one that it's happening on. I can't see any particular mark-up in the html so I'm guessing Google is doing something cleaver as part of it's snippets for list pages. A search for other product pages of yours reveals snippets rendered the same way.
I don't think <metaname="robots" content="noodp,noydir">is going to work.</metaname="robots">
-
Hi! I'm guessing that you're seeing Google deploying some listing rich snippets for your meta description. Take a look at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-real-estate-snippets-13928.html and http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/08/new-snippets-for-list-pages.html for a little more information about what may be happening. Does that help explain things at all?
-
Hi. Thanks for the quick response. I have never changed the meta description and Google has always shown this, up until the last few weeks. It is a good keyword-full paragraph that has worked well. If you want to look at the site it is www.simonsaysdressup.co.uk. The category I am refering to is 'Burlesque Wardrobe' and the highest ranking keywords for this category is 'burlesque clothing' and 'burlesque outfits'.
Thanks so much for your help
-
When did you change your meta description was it in the last few days?
Have you tried to add this:
<metaname="robots" content="noodp,noydir">Without looking at the site, I couldn't tell you what's causing the problem but Google could be pulling info from the open directory, this tag will force Google and Yahoo to use the description you give them</metaname="robots">
Google do not always show the meta description. If they feel a more meaningful snippet can be had from the content, it will take something from there. If you have little or no content (say just images) then Google does not have much to show.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
We added hundreds of pages to our website & restructured the layout to include 3 additional locations within the sub-pages, same brand/domain name. How long could Google take to crawl/index the new pages and rank the keywords used within those pages?
We added hundreds of pages to our website & restructured the layout to include 3 additional locations within the sub-pages, same brand/domain name. The 3 locations old domains were redirected to their sites within our main brand domain. How long could Google take to crawl/index the new pages and rank the keywords used within those pages? And possibly increase our domain authority hopefully? We didn't want our brand spread out over multiple websites/domains on the internet. This also allowed for more content to be written on pages, per each of our locations service's, as well.
Web Design | | BurgSimpson0 -
In Google Anayltics does the iPad always report portrait orientation?
I find I have disproportionate anount of visitors viewing at 768x1024, which coincides with the high iOS visitor rate. However, does this mean the vistors are all viewing in portrait orientation, or does the report portair regardlaess of orientation?
Web Design | | gotomarketers0 -
For a web design firm, should i make a google plus local page or company page?
I have a web design firm located in India, At this moment we are focusing on local clients as the current competition in local market is very low. But in few months we will shift our focus to outsourcing. So I wanted to know if we should make a google plus local page and connect it with my google places account and website or should I make a google plus business page and connect it to website? Our major focus is on seo. Thanks
Web Design | | hard0 -
Site lost in Google
Recently I switched my from Joomla to WordPress. I did 301 re-directs ...and promptly fell from Google results after 5 YEARS at no. 1-3 Still ranking 1 in Bing and 3 in Yahoo...but nowhere near the traffic I previously had. Here is my site: http://selfdirectedira.org Any suggestions? TIA
Web Design | | tvegas0 -
How can i write content rich descriptions?
we have recently started using seomoz. how can i make descriptions more content rich?
Web Design | | WCGAdmin0 -
Do Pages That Rearrange Set Off Any Red Flags for Google?
We have a broad content site that includes crowdsourced lists of items. A lot of the pages allow voting, which causes the content on the pages (sometimes the content is up to 10 pages deep) to completely rearrange, and therefore spread out and switch pages often among the (up to 10) pages of content. Now, could this be causing any kind of duplicate content or any other kind of red flags for Google? I know that the more the page changes the better, but if it's all the same content that is being moved up and down constantly, could Google think we're pulling some kind of "making it look like we have new content" scheme and ding us for these pages? If so, what would anyone recommend we do? Let's take an example of a list of companies with bad customer service. We let the internet vote them up and down all the time, the order changes depending on the votes in real time. Is that page doomed, or does Google see it and love it?
Web Design | | BG19850 -
Why is site not being indexed by Google, and not showing on a crawl test??
On a site we developed of which .com is forwarded to .net domain, we quit getting crawled by google on about the 20th of Feb. Now when we try to run a crawl test on either url, we get There was an error fetching this page. Error description For some reason the page returned did not describe itself as an html page. It could be possible that the url is serving an image, rss feed, pdf, or xml file of some sort. The crawl tool does not currently report metrics on this type of data. Our other sites are fine and this was up to this date. We took out noodp, noydir today as the only thing we could think of. Site is on WP cms.
Web Design | | RobertFisher0